Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner Arthur Miller's central decade of work—All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), and A View from the Bridge (1955–56)—earned him critical and popular acclaim and is still performed and studied around the world. And Miller's refusal to implicate any potential communists for the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956 gave the playwright himself a heroic role to play—just weeks before he married the international sex symbol Marilyn Monroe. This critical biography, by the director of the Arthur Miller Centre at Britain's University of East Anglia, offers new insights into that marriage, and how the other significant events of Miller's life informed his great mid-century plays.

"This is a fat, endlessly informative book, the work of a lifetime.... It is as definitive as we are likely to get, with plenty of new material. It also reveals much more than Miller did in his autobiography, Timebends. Above all, it is a book about the puzzle of politics and art and about the unreliable solution provided by sex—or Marilyn Monroe as it was once called."—Sunday Times (London)

"Bigsby leaves no facet of playwright Arthur Miller's life, public or private, unexamined in this literally and figuratively weighty tome.... Although this volume covers only the first 48 of Miller's 89 years, the book is a definite godsend to theater lovers and generations of students probing Miller's life and work."—Booklist (starred review)

"Contains electrifying new perspectives on its subject.... Miller, it's clear, was not a dry, cerebral naive but a principled, passionate talent, who recognized imperfection in himself and in others. The man who emerges from these pages is more of a showman than is usually credited and more of a modern hero, too."—Observer (London)